


o death do not feel like the victor

by Araine



Category: Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-14
Updated: 2012-02-14
Packaged: 2017-10-31 04:44:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/340012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Araine/pseuds/Araine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the time before Death, the One has no need of a Champion.</p>
            </blockquote>





	o death do not feel like the victor

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Pax](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pax/gifts).



> for [dai_stiho](http://dai-stiho.livejournal.com/)'s friend/ship challenge
> 
> original prompt: Lone Power/One's Champion  
> "The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;  
> Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;  
> Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.  
> For nothing now can ever come to any good."  
> \- W.H. Auden (http://www.npr.org/programs/death/readings/poetry/aude.html)
> 
> title from Noah and the Whale's "Hold My Hand As I'm Lowered"

In the time before Death, the One has no need of a Champion.

\--

In the beginning, the One’s Messenger dances. Quicker than light and smaller than the head of the smallest pin, she leaps and pirouettes and waltzes across a stage of superheated everything. 

In this early time, the division between matter and energy means nothing. Everything just is: impossibly and irreversibly born out of nothing and into sudden being. The nascent universe screams its sudden and uncontaminated joy.

  
_Hallelujah!  
Hallelujah!  
I’m alive!_   


She, as new-made as the universe, exults amidst it.

\--

Of her siblings, One stands brighter and more glorious than the rest.

The heart of light rests in her sister, brighter than any in all the universes, but the nature is hers to be soft and supple and warm.

In her exists the joy of precocious youth, and she looks out on the all of everything in wonder.

  


_Dance with me, sister!_  


The Star of the Morning takes her by the hand and spins with her quicker and quicker.

\--

The One’s Courier stands shell-shocked amidst stellar shrapnel and the fluorescing gamma-irradiated carnage, amongst confused and frightened atoms that had once made up a new star’s uncertain bulk, now huddling together through the force of a different gravity. 

For an ephemeral moment their bewilderment is hers. She knows of nothing in the universe quite so horrible as this latecomer’s gift.

  


_My gift is Death, mother!_   


The remnants of the star-that-once-was draw her gaze as they draw everything else: a sudden inexorable pull that neither light nor matter nor time can escape.

Death has marked its black spot on the fabric of reality itself.

  
_My gift is death; that all things might end._   


\--

When She Who Mothered Death finally consents to a meeting, she is neither contrite nor anxious. Pride, instead, has laid its mantle over her shoulders and across her brow. It fills and shapes the places that once went untouched by innocent splendor. 

The Winged One smiles in the presence of the Power who is and always will be her sister.

  
_You are angry with me, sister. Do you want me to wear the accusation in your look?_   


The moment feels as if it could freeze colder than the entropy that is Expiry’s creation.

  
_Your gift has wrought a horror._   


  
_No. It has wrought much more._   


  
_What more can come from the death of all things?_   


The Lonely Power holds her hands out in a supplication, and her eyes are a look that maybe neither of them understands.

  
_Come with me, and I will show you._   


\--

  
_For ever and for always she will remember her refusal, and she will hate her lack of regret._   


\--

Her sword flames with the silver irradiance of moonblaze and starshine and plasmapyre. The point of it drags in sand that was once mountains, but that cannot quench the brightness of the blade. The afterimage of such an awesome spectacle still shimmers in the air and in the ground and in the very fabric of pleroma. 

She sighs. Weariness escapes with her breath and mingles with the air. From across the field of battle she catches her first glimpse of the power at the heart of death. The Power Who Fights Alone is proud still, but she also stands afraid.

  
_Sister._   


The Champion’s sword rises an inch above the ground with the clear new vision of her closest and lost sister. There are lines in her form now: lean and powerful and sharp. She has cloaked herself in the darkness at universe’s end.

  
_Once fairest, Bright Star of the Morning, and now fallen, Descendent Star of Evening._   


Her sister’s eyes are bright as beacons: two stars midst a night full of black, and the message there is unmistakable.

  
_I will not lose.  
Death is in my creation and it is in everything.  
Time alone will prove me the victor._   


The Warrior takes to the sky: a comet of light and pure energy and fury that transcends the laws bound into reality.

  
_Greetings, sister, and my defiance!_   


\--

The battle is over. Unconstrained by time, she returns to the very beginning. 

She stands there: a single point of stillness in the chaos and violence of universe’s beginning. Energy burns nuclear-hot and fuses to matter and antimatter, which soon collides and annihilates with the force of asymmetrical opposition.

  
_Alive!  
Alive!_   


The brand-new universe peals euphoric with it.

She cannot think of any word as big and complex and terrible as _alive_. 

\--

To the first flickering of sentience among the khiliocosms she gives the Power of wizardry and the Knowledge of how to use it, and she was The Firebringer who walked within and among the Art.

  
_Why do you give them the fire, when you know it will only burn them in the end?  
Why do you let them prolong their suffering?_   


She teaches the art of sticks and thread and patience among rain and wind and ignores her sister’s doubting voice.

  
_The universe will come to nothing in the end.  
Let it._   


\--

When the One’s Champion finally claims her victory against her sister, it is easy; only a flash of blade and a stroke of power and some of the Lone One’s own treachery. Doubt and hesitation do not color her until the very moment afterward.

The Fallen Power gazes upon her sister and within her great age and her great bitterness there is the Bright Power who has just been struck down by one so dearly loved and then lost. 

She dies, as only a Power can die: with the universe standing in silence and sorrow for One who has caused it great pain but Who is also responsible for the magnificent and terrible joy of its existence.

  
_Goodbye._   


Her sister fades into light and the heart of time outside of time with the slow certainty of an exhaled breath. She watches the Lone Power as she disappears, and in the light of her fading sun she can see the long-in-coming day of a planet at universe’s edge and a species with the power and willingness to refuse the gift of death.

  
_Someday soon, sister, and we will dance again._   


\--

She will stand with her sister, at the end of the universe when all the lights have gone out, and they will look at each other through the never-ending cold of entropy.

  
_This is your victory, sister.  
What now?_   


The Beautiful One smiles and extends her hand. 


End file.
